A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.
Weinstein and Readinger take a look at problems facing healthcare professionals and suggest ways to fix them.
The authors make it clear from the first line of the introduction that American health care, as it stands right now, is a problem. “We talk a lot about the pandemic and the impact of its aftermath on our healthcare system,” they write. “But our system, although revered as one of the best in the world, has been broken for much longer than three years.” What follows is a blueprint to fix this system, developed using a protocol called Diagnostic Thinking that included one-on-one and group interviews with nurses who pinpointed issues in the health care industry. Those interviews led to the three sections of the book: “Workforce,” addressing problems finding qualified nurses; “Well-Being,” a discussion about taking care of nurses in the workplace; and “Wisdom,” which outlines ideas for accomplishing these goals. Chapters in these sections include topics such as “Creating a Culture of Emotional Safety in Healthcare,” “Inspiring Gen Z to Stay,” “Frontline Nurses…Experiencing Well-Being,” and “Unleashing the Power of Nurses.” The final chapter, “From Ideation to Reality,” is written by Weinstein, a nurse, and includes bulleted ideas (give nurses a voice; promote nurse health; identify needs and solve one problem at a time) that could serve as a call to action for health care leaders. This book isn’t for a general audience—it’s specifically geared toward nurses and other health care professionals and is chock-full of supporting evidence regarding the problems that need to be tackled within the nursing workforce. The text is well-organized and the methodology is spelled out in full, but this is much more an expanded research paper (including 20 pages of endnotes) than it is a highly readable look at the health care industry. But that isn’t what the authors were after—they want to shine a light on some serious problems, and this book certainly does that. It also serves up some answers and suggestions for a way forward to a healthier health care system.
A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781637559666
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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